Perhaps not ever.  Chris Pratley (the “One Note owner”, Group Program Manager of Office) posted a quick bit about using OneNote to organize blogs.  It's great, isn't it?  I used to do the same.  In fact, I thought “Hey, I'll just make a quick OneNote plug-in to post directly to .Text and I'll be sitting pretty.  Perhaps I can even use Ink occasionally.”.  Alas, that was not meant to be.

You see, as many of you may know, OneNote has no automation facilities.  At all. The API is not public, and can't be used.  So if you put your blog notes into OneNote, you have to (really) copy-paste entries into some other editor to publish them.  If I edit something there (spelling) I have to move those changes back to OneNote again, or just let the data be out of sync.  I don't know about you, but I thought software existed to reduce the number of manual steps in my life.  I thought the general consensus was that data should be stored once, and mapped to many views -- not stored many times in many ways.

Why is this?  Well, the only reason I've ever heard was unofficial - “look what happened to Word”.   Okay, what about VSTO? Can't we use that -- or is that insecure.

Like many others, I too want this tool to be automatible in some (any) way.  OneNote used to be an integral part of my organization skills.  But because putting any data into it was like dumping data to a printer (I could look at it, but not use it anywhere else), I gave it up.

So, now that Chris is blogging, hear my plea -- Make OneNote useful!  A killer free blogging plug-in would sell more copies of OneNote.  A meeting minute compiler plug-in would make it salable to the companies I work for.  And not least, some of these would make me money as well -- incentive for me to push OneNote.

I'll beg more if I have to.